1. Field of the Invention
Most present-day communication systems are based on a line-oriented infrastructure for speech communication and on an additional data-packet-oriented infrastructure for data communication. Line-oriented communication relates in particular to conventional analog or digital speech telephony. In the course of a development activity which is taking place at the moment, efforts are being made to migrate line-oriented communication components step-by-step into a packet-oriented communication environment, for example into existing local area networks, so-called LANs.
2. Description of the Related Art
According to previous developments, for a migration process to a pure packet-oriented data network, existing line-oriented terminals must either be replaced by packet-oriented terminals or must be retrofitted with a converter, for example a so-called Internet protocol adapter, for conversion between line-oriented communication and packet-oriented communication. However, appropriate packet-oriented terminals for speech communication, or equivalent converters, are technically highly complex. Furthermore, owing to the quality required for real-time speech transmission, terminals and converters such as these are subject to considerable bandwidth and delay time requirements for the packet-oriented data network on which the data transport is based.
In contrast to this, further use of unmodified line-oriented terminals requires a separate cable network to additionally connect these terminals to the cable network for the packet data network. Such use of two separate cable networks for speech communication and data communication is likewise highly complex.